SpotMini: Boston Dynamics’ Latest Dog Robot That Opens Doors [Video]

Boston Dynamics, the robot R&D lab previously owned by X, a subsidiary of Alphabet and affiliated to Google, has been acquired by Softbank in 2017. Whenever Boston Dynamics posts a new prototype video on YouTube, it’s quickly trending and gets shared a lot in social media. The company gained a lot of reputation for being innovative in robotics and sharing their milestones in public.

After the Atlas and Handle robots, they now published a video of SpotMini, a quadrupedal, dog-like, robot that can walk around and with an hand-extension, is able to open doors. Watching this video I can’t help but feel like I’m watching a dog trying to open the door, with the difference of the dog’s head being a human-like hand to better operate the door’s handle.

What do you think about this one? Can you think of any commercial use cases? Is that going to be the first robot spy dog? We’d love to hear your thoughts below in the comment section. Enjoy!

Hi there and thanks for reading my article! I’m Chris the founder of TechAcute. I write about technology news and share experiences from my life in the enterprise world. Drop by on Twitter and say ‘hi’ sometime. 😉